


itch

by ruruka



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Other, also noncanon compliant, an idea from someone else that i probably fucked up but at least i had fun.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-06-27 15:15:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19793548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruruka/pseuds/ruruka
Summary: ryou's lonely.





	itch

Ryou drinks as much tea as one would expect of a Japanese man who’d spent half his life in London. 

Lately, though he does not take the care nor have the time to think upon it, it’s been far less cups and kettle and rather a sharp abundance of convenience store iced tea cans stacking up around his nightstand. One night he’d mixed some with what the empty energy drink bottle lain to his floor had first held. That’d been a productive four hours.

Perhaps that’s where the shadows beneath his eyes have crept from, but he doesn’t find them so stark as to notice when he glances to the bathroom mirror. He does that sometimes, but only sometimes. And just once, he’d stared at his reflection for three or four or ten minutes as he let the water hush over his hands, and he’d said hello and how do you do and everything polite, in his mind make believing that he had to hurry before someone would come pounding at the door for him to quit monopolizing the bathroom. But that never happened. He’d only stopped his game once the faucet had gone on so long as to scald the skin of his knuckles scarlet. The bandage flexes around his squeezing fingers. 

His desk sits in his bedroom in such a way as to allow the moonlight to soak it through the curtains, cheap and effective lighting through the latest hours and then the earliest ones again. Static echoes from the computer monitor whenever his sleeve should brush by it or something of the like, blinking to the muffled black reflection of the room in its glass, coasting a gaze for that moonlit window, all its panes bathed in a silent ivory. Heavy eyes blink themselves again, a squint for the outside world he would swear on a better day had cast some certain sort of shadow there. Yet all the same, he’s rooted, facing again to the crimped book binding at the center of his maple wood school work desk. An antique his father had picked up somewhere on the east coast of some veranda in some country out there, Ryou had heard him go on and on about as it was shoved into his room eight or nine years ago now- the desk, naturally, not the aged yet pristine occultist books atop it. His father would never pay such close attention.

Dust rims only the corners of the book that lay open before him. The pages have beiged over however many years it’d been in circulation before he nabbed it off a thrift store shelf, causation to the careful hands that mull over it. Layered beside it, two other thick volumes rest, bound in dark maroon and golds, the milk of his irises begging their patience as he instead scans the first. 

Three:thirteen in the morning doesn’t _need_ to be used for hunching at his desk poring over contemptible literature, though he’s inclined to use his moments wisely whether they be evenings spent napping or midnights awake. 

“Summoning the devil is no easy task,” he murmurs just low enough for himself to intake. The book pulls nearer to him. “But an everyday demon doesn’t take much.” 

He blinks. 

By the time he’s folded out of his room and then swept back behind the old door’s creak, the book is closed beside the others, instructions clear in the hazy midst of his memory; step one, light a candle. Right. He hopes the demons don’t mind pumpkin cookie scent. With the match struck across the underside of his desk, the flame flickers in his pupils as he watches it a short moment, lays it forth to the bent wick tip. Fire flares to life in a stout circle of light before his face. 

Step two hurts a bit more, but if he’s already got a bandage wrapping his hand, he may as well get as much use out of it as possible. He does hiss as the pocket knife slices one rapid stroke across his palm, clutching its wrist as breaths catch up to him. Six drops around the candle’s wick. The bandage pulls forward to soak up the remaining bleed. 

He’s left standing there, candle flirting over his desktop, moon cut away to a sliver with a close of his curtains. It falls along the carpet, that slim stripe, drawing a pathway, almost, from window lip to the opposite wall corner. Ryou stays in his place. There’d been another few pieces to the process, if he can recall, the next being a chant, a summoning song. He wonders how exactly he’s supposed to go about it, but he’d been forced to chapel by his grandmother enough times to assume a position of hands folded (in meager a flinch) and head bowed. 

“Deliver the burdened and free the abandoned,” his lethargic voice pulls out. “Deliver the burdened and free the abandoned. Deliver the burdened and free the abandoned. Deliver the burdened and free the abandoned. Deliver the burdened and free the abandoned. Deliver the burdened and free the abandoned.”

If he hadn’t lost count, it’s been six exactly, right, yes, so he wets his mouth and glances for the neon of the clock beside the bed, counting the minutes until three:thirty-six shall hit it. The time being leaves him waiting there, wondering about all he’s just done and all that may go forward. It won’t matter much either way the ritual turns. If he summons a demon...cool. His father’s away in Holland for the month, so it wouldn’t bother him. If nothing at all happens...alright. At least then he won’t have to share the banana bread in the fridge downstairs. 

At three:thirty-five he’s not trembling with fear nor excitement, rather taken to a seat on his bed, blankets unkempt beneath him, watching. That strip of moonlight still lines the carpet, a token for his focus as it blears in and out. Ryou peers at it until the very moment where it becomes the only light in the whole room. And that’s the first sensation of fever he’s felt the whole time, the clench in his chest as he looks up to where the candle has extinguished itself. Down the sleek of its wax built side, a red droplet drips. 

In the movies he’s seen, as he’s an avid fan of horror in its most artistic form, something wild will happen, something grandiose, like cracks of sudden thunder or a phone ringing off the hook, or maybe even a lamp bulb will explode within its shade. But that isn’t how it goes in realism (something he’d pointed out last time his friends had come around for a night, and they’d asked in tight winces how he knew such a thing), not before or now, where the most he’s gotten is a candle blown out and the dark hot stink of blood filling suddenly his senses as he traces the moonlight trail all the way to the wall corner that penumbras dance within. When Ryou blinks again, the outline of _something_ draws him right to his feet. Awe. That’s all he knows. 

The newcomer welcomes himself with a hard sputtering cough.

“God’s fucking sake, it’s dusty in here.” Admittedly, if anything’s to take Ryou aback about this, it’s the demon’s tipsy little voice, no roughness and gravel and perhaps vague sex appeal about it. The thing, whatever it is- shoulders break through the shadows curling around it, shoulders and arms and waist and hips and then, at last, his face, a striking mess of hair and cinnamon colored eyes enough that Ryou wouldn’t put past considering he’s daydreaming in the bathroom mirror again. But the demon moves differently than he does, jutting drags of arms and legs, something of a pure creature crawling toward the center of his bedroom. Ryou ogles him without expression.

Fangs plink together against a grimace. “What? Never seen a God before? Quit your staring, prick.”

Though his brows raise either eye to surprise, it’s mild, studying the new...apparent God in his presence. A tongue wets his lips. “Huh. You’re a shinigami, then?”

“Hilarious,” the other scoffs. “Keep talking like that, and you’ll be the one trapped in Hell for eternity.”

A finger moves to his chin as it tilts. Just a meter or so sunders them, he stood beside the bed and the demon poised nearer the closet wall. It’s just a little bit awkward to sink into silence the way they do, staring across the room to an underworld being that’s somehow stolen almost every aspect of his own appearance, but it’s...it’s almost nice at the same time. Feels like family to be resembled so much. Nice. “What can I call you?” he next raises, to which a sneer lifts back, quiet in the still, still room a long stretch before, arms crossed and voice hardly intelligible, the demon says, “...Bakura.”

“Oh,” falls Ryou’s immediate response. “That’s my name, too. My surname. Maybe that’s why you’re here.”

“I’m here because every so often, some little lonely freak like you will think it’s funny to play with forces they don’t understand.” The high collar of his coat conceals half the grin that smears him, dark and macabre. “I ought to be thankful for that. Maybe you’ll actually be of use to me if you’re desperate enough to go cacodemon hunting.”

Another rhythm of taps go to his face before the hand drops limply aside his hip again, blood beginning to dry and stick the gauze fibers to it. “Huh. Okay.” Tenebrous below the thin of his eyes, Ryou offers half a shrug forward. “Are you hungry?”

The demon blinks.

Downstairs, the kitchen isn’t quite so messy as his bedroom, a few counter crumbs, chairs not pushed in, but Ryou thinks this house fits him well. He’d been thrilled at the notion of moving anywhere besides another apartment while his father traveled there and here and there again, even if he finds most days he’s left to manage it all on his own. It doesn’t remind him of their house overseas, much more rustic and much less cottagey, missing the memory of an extra bedroom beside his own trimmed with pink and chiffon. But a two bedroom, one bath, five stairs leading from top to bottom floor had been all he and his father had needed once it’d been decided they’d settle in the East. And it’s cozy. It’s cozy even with the monster scarfing cold leftovers across the table from him.

“They don’t have fast food in Hell, I suppose,” Ryou comments, a genuine observation accompanying the fried chicken grease shining on fingers and face. Bakura eats like the world is ending. Ryou rasps a laugh. 

“They don’t have anything in Hell,” answers back through a stuffed mouth. 

The dimmed kitchen holds them quiet another moment of studying, gentle. “They have lots of stuff. I wouldn’t mind visiting sometime.”

“Whatever you’re picturing, it’s wrong. The only people who like being in Hell are the ones who get the special treatment for being ass-kissing archfiends,” Bakura growls. Ryou watches him bite directly through a chicken bone. “...I’m more of a _spirit_ than a demon.”

“So you’re dead?” 

Motions pause to drag Bakura’s eyes into a leer, one more of thought than supposed ire. “Yeah. Yeah.” 

Ryou alights in interest. “How’d you die, then?”

That’s where the bond breaks, Bakura preferring to sneer and scoff than reply more proper. “It’s been thousands of years, you think I can remember? I was probably shot in the head for being too fucking brilliant.”

Silence takes Ryou into his nod. He associates the cool feeling of either bare arm, clothed only in a soft cotton tee shirt a few days deep, with the spirit and his presence so close to him, an arm length over the breakfast table he normally hosts dates for one on. Slow blinks pad his eyelids. 

“Do you know my sister?” 

Bakura pauses snarling against a mouthful of cold meat if only to perk a perplexed look across the table. Underneath, Ryou tightens both hands on his lap. 

“I don’t know exactly how everything works, but maybe you’re able to communicate with anyone who’s died, regardless of being in Heaven or Hell.” His jaw raises to stare straightforward. “Her name’s Amane. She’s probably still eight years old, I don’t think people age much in the afterlife. My mother, too, you might know her. I was just wondering how they’re doing.”

Between them, Bakura’s fingers flex idly, subtle twitches of muscle as his face remains staid. No lighting or telephone or lamplight implosion, only his existence there on the other side of the table, rich with the smell of velveteen smoke. Thickly, a rattle clears at the base of his throat. “Uh, sure, they’re fine.” He licks the top expanse of his gumline. “Get me that banana bread you offered earlier, would ya? And some iced tea. This chicken’s dry.”

For the first time in as long as he can count, the way Ryou smiles lives without the slightest ember of hurt. Something’s light inside him. Something thrums. 

It hits him on his way back from shutting the fridge, clicking a can to the table wood, that he finally has someone to play tabletop games with again. 

Cool.


End file.
